Abe says Russian-Japanese cooperation will yield great results

TOKYO, November 22. /TASS/. The combination of Russia’s power with Japan’s technology and expertise under an eight-point cooperation plan that had been proposed by Tokyo will bring huge results, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in an exclusive interview with TASS First Deputy Director General Mikhail Gusman. "If we combine Russia’s strength with Japanese technologies and expertise, it will definitely yield great rewards. We wish that these rewards would be understandable for the people of both countries. We wish that the results of our cooperation would extend to the economy and daily life of Russian people. I proposed the eight-point cooperation plan, proceeding from those assumptions," the Japanese PM stressed. Under the plan, Moscow and Tokyo have developed roughly 150 joint projects in various areas in the last two and a half years, Abe added, citing bilateral collaboration in greenhouse business, rehabilitation medicine, and easing traffic jams. Russian-Japanese ties entered a significantly new era of active development in 2016, when Abe had come up with the eight-point cooperation plan between the two countries. Since then the leaders of both states have met over 20 times, including President Putin’s visit to Japan and Abe’s numerous trips to Russia. The plan envisages efforts to foster relations between Japan and Russia in the energy sector, small and medium-sized businesses, promotion of industrialization of the Far East, expansion of the export base and tourism, as well as the proposal to strengthen cooperation in the cutting-edge technologies, including nuclear energy, and the sphere of humanitarian exchanges. There were previous reports that more than 60 out of the 150 projects that had been developed under the plan are already at an active stage of implementation. Read more